Proximity Graphs for Defining Surfaces over Point Clouds

Abstract

We present a new definition of an implicit surface over a noisy point cloud. It can be evaluated very fast, but, unlike other definitions based on the moving least squares approach, it does not suffer from artifacts. In order to achieve robustness, we propose to use a different kernel function that approximates geodesic distances on the surface by utilizing a geometric proximity graph. The starting point in the graph is determined by approximate nearest neighbor search. From a variety of possibilities, we have examined the Delaunay graph and the sphere-of-influence graph (SIG). For both, we propose to use modifications, the r-SIG and the pruned Delaunay graph. We have implemented our new surface definition as well as a test environment which allows to visualize and to evaluate the quality of the surfaces. We have evaluated the different surfaces induced by different proximity graphs. The results show that artifacts and the root mean square error are significantly reduced.

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Bibtex

@INPROCEEDINGS{klein-2004-proximity,
author = {Klein, J. and Zachmann, Gabriel},
title = {Proximity Graphs for Defining Surfaces over Point Clouds},
booktitle = {Symposium on Point-Based Graphics},
year = {2004},
month = jun,
keywords = {and object representations, approximation of surfaces and contours, curve, solid, surface},
abstract = {We present a new definition of an implicit surface over a noisy point cloud. It can be evaluated
very fast, but, unlike other definitions based on the moving least squares approach, it does not
suffer from artifacts. In order to achieve robustness, we propose to use a different kernel function
that approximates geodesic distances on the surface by utilizing a geometric proximity graph. The
starting point in the graph is determined by approximate nearest neighbor search. From a variety of
possibilities, we have examined the Delaunay graph and the sphere-of-influence graph (SIG). For
both, we propose to use modifications, the r-SIG and the pruned Delaunay graph. We have implemented
our new surface definition as well as a test environment which allows to visualize and to evaluate
the quality of the surfaces. We have evaluated the different surfaces induced by different proximity
graphs. The results show that artifacts and the root mean square error are significantly reduced.}
}